Articles by Talia Kagan (36)

For the dedicated students who loved and continue to love Tamora Pierce’s young adult fantasy novels, perhaps Saturday was a day more magical than most. After all, it’s not every day you get to meet one of your childhood idols.

Monday was a good day for New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid.

He has shoulder-length dirty-blonde hair and a welcoming smile — and no, he won’t let you bring in food. He is Library Clerk Stephen Gervais, and even if you don’t frequent the Rockefeller Library, where he guards the entrance three days a week, you might recognize him from a recent cameo in “SciLi State of Mind” — a student-produced music video that Gervais found to be “a delight.”

Jonathan Mooney ’00 couldn’t read until he was 12. A decade later, the writer and public speaker, who is dyslexic, graduated from Brown with a third-grade spelling level, the phonetic awareness of a seventh-grader and a 4.0 grade point average. That is the success story that helped sell his first book, “Learning Outside the Lines: Two Ivy League Students with Learning Disabilities and ADHD Give You the Tools for Academic Success and Educational Revolution.”

“You’ll smell the berries,” said Steve Peck, manager of a Wayland Square coffee shop, inhaling the earthy smell of sun-dried Ethiopian coffee. He then displays the Sumatra bean, which he said has been aged for three to five years. The Ethiopia Sidamo is another favorite, because of its “kind of lemony flavor,” he said.

Spring Weekend rain-capacity tickets sold out yesterday morning after trouble with the Web site that hosted sales left frustrated students refreshing their browsers for 40 minutes.

The creation of a graduate program in Africana studies marks the latest development in the growth of the department, which hired renowned author Chinua Achebe in the fall. The Corporation approved the new program in December, said Tricia Rose, professor of Africana studies and chair of the department.

Right now, Brown’s athletic complex is unattractive, inconveniently located and insufficient to meet the community’s needs. But come January 2012, the fenced construction site and asphalt parking lot will be replaced by a red-bricked fitness and aquatics center and a grassy tree-lined quadrangle.

The IE Brown Executive M.B.A. Program, an experimental business master’s program resulting from a partnership between the University and the Instituto Empresa Business School, will begin next spring, Provost David Kertzer ’69 P’95 P’98 announced Monday.Instituto Empresa is a top-tier international business school located in Madrid and Segovia, Spain.